This year's major act of resurrection is Cristina, Regina di Svezia by Jacopo Foroni, an Italian-born composer who spent much of his adult life in Sweden. And while the music of the opera, premiered in 1849, undoubtedly has elements of Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi in it, Foroni apes none of them, fashioning instead a score of considerable distinctiveness, where mild Germanic influences (think Weber, early Wagner even) also feature.

Unusually, Cristina starts with a protracted choral onslaught, as a bunch of Swedish courtiers celebrate the cessation of Thirty Years’ War hostilities. The high quality of the Wexford chorus is immediately apparent: they're superbly incisive, and sing with a red-blooded lustiness of attack throughout the evening, though occasionally looking stranded spatially by the tableau-style blocking of director Stephen Medcalf.

Medcalf's basic working space is the marbled atrium of Jamie Vartan's set design, accommodating state convocations, a wedding, and a court of judgement. More private confrontations occur in front of a drop panel: a rather faceless, spartan area populated by chairs, a model globe, and an escritoire. Medcalf moves the action fluidly enough between these two locations, but is less successful weaning the performers off the type of melodramatic posturing operatic singers frequently resort to when tackling overheated emotional content.

To be fair, Medcalf is battling against a libretto by Giovanni Carlo Casanova (no relation to the serial fornicator) replete with political truisms and clapped-out romantic imagery, and of distinctly average quality. The updating of the action to the mid-twentieth century helps shake off the period fustiness, but feels contrived in places. While "peace for our time" newsreels of Chamberlain returning from Munich clarify what the Act One courtiers are celebrating about, the unfurling of a Union Jack flag painted in Swedish national colours is an unhelpful obfuscation.

The soloists are largely excellent. They're spearheaded by the young Australian soprano Helena Dix, whose commanding portrait of the Swedish queen, frustrated in love and outmanoeuvred politically, builds a formidable head of steam as the evening progresses. At full voice Dix is thrilling vocally, cutting heroically through both chorus and orchestra. She sounds like a major Wagner soprano in the making.

Baritone David Stout's dignified depiction of statesman-diplomat Axel Oxenstjerna is no less impressive. In its unerring evenness of tonal production and eschewal of histrionics, it's the vocal performance of the evening.

There's strong support from Italian mezzo-soprano Lucia Cirillo, whose fiery personality and burnished vocalism combine to vivid effect in her portrayal of Cristina's cousin Maria Eufrosina. A pawn in the power-plays of others, Maria's love for the conspirator Gabriele is constantly thwarted, and Cirillo catches her riven emotional state powerfully.

Despite the undoubted strength of the central vocal performances, there's a sense of punches being pulled in some of Cristina's key dramatic moments. The foiling of the plot to murder Cristina is a missed opportunity: both guards and conspirators seem a notably well-mannered crew, and there's little sense of the simmering hatred and resentment which fuelled the abortive insurrection in the first place.

The final scene also hangs fire a little, the death sentence on the conspirators reacted to in slightly hangdog fashion by those attending it, Cristina's subsequent pardon and abdication arguably a touch under-projected in director Stephen Medcalf's hieratic conception.

Medcalf does add a gloss of his own at the opera's conclusion, where the royal guards point freeze-frame rifles at the prisoners Cristina has just been pardoning. Are they going to shoot them anyway? Or merely signalling that major power issues remain unsettled as regime change beckons? Either way it's an effective gesture, a question-mark hovering suggestively at the fall of the curtain.

Moments of occasionally prosaic dramaturgy notwithstanding, this is ultimately a persuasive, involving performance of Foroni's opera, not least because the contribution of the festival orchestra, punchily conducted by Andrew Greenwood, is so consistently energised and committed.

Is it a lost masterpiece? No it isn't, but finding one isn't really Wexford's raison d'être in the first place. Its mission has always been to step beyond the path most travelled, and show its loyal audiences what's lurking in the long grass beyond the neatly trimmed verges of the standard operatic repertoire. With this new Cristina, in the festival's sixty-second year of operation, that mission is once again generously accomplished.

Terry Blain is an arts journalist and cultural commentator, contributing regularly to BBC Music Magazine, Opera Britannia, Culture Northern Ireland and other publications.